The paper focuses on one of several findings derived from the author’s doctoral thesis, submitted successfully in 2014 to the University of Oxford. It argues that both in historical terms and in the present the absence of change to high-stakes assessment systems hinders change to curriculum and pedagogy at a system level.

Literature on assessment as a social practice highlights how assessment systems can be understood as a way of structuring modern societies, as a means of promoting certain types of hegemonic knowledge (Filer, 2000), and as mechanisms that shape our views about ourselves (Broadfoot and Pollard, 2000; Hanson, 2000). As Foucault indicated in 1975 (1991), examinations are among the strongest technologies of discipline, which allow for controlling societies and individuals.

Similarly, this study concludes that ideas on and models of assessment are embedded in ideologies, perspectives about society and educational projects. High-stakes assessment systems both historically and in the present have responded to a functional view of society where individuals have to be distributed in a pre-defined social order (Flórez, forthcoming). This approach contradicts more emancipatory and egalitarian models of society, which have been promoted in different periods and with different names but advocating similar principles. As the high-stakes are on the side of assessment systems, actors in education have tended to follow this direction rather than that of change and reform, generating a vicious cycle where more emancipatory discourses are kept as marginal.

In the current context of expansion of neo-liberal models of education both at a European and international level, high-stakes assessment systems as a technology of power have become particularly salient. In the absence of a strong state to govern education, neo-liberal ideologies have transformed these assessment systems into a means of steering the system at a distance through governing by numbers (Grek, 2008 and 2009; Lawn and Ozga, 2009; Ozga et al., 2009). The pressure that is exerted both on schools, local authorities and national education systems through national and international testing systems which promote competition, rankings and constant quality improvement, have consolidated as a means of moving actors towards a specific direction in terms of what the goals of education are considered to be.

Chile is studied as an extreme case of neo-liberal education, as a market-oriented model was imposed during the dictatorship of Pinochet without any mitigation of the consequences of free market applied to areas such as health, pensions and education. The legislation of that period is still in place today, and Chile is currently one of the most unequal economies in the world (OECD, 2014) with a highly segregated system of education (Valenzuela et al., 2010). In that context, there is an increasing number of assessment systems directed to teachers, schools and students, aimed at informing ‘costumers’ about the quality of the ‘service’ provided by schools. The most pervasive of these systems is Simce, despite recent criticism about its quality, consequences, purposes, constructs, score construction and interpretation (Manzi et al., 2010; Ortiz, 2012; ACER, 2013; Flórez, 2013). The current context repeats the logic observed in previous decades: education is impoverished by turning schools into places where students are trained for testing, while curriculum and pedagogy are expected to follow the direction of more constructivist and critical approaches.

The questions that guided the study on which this paper draws were:

• What are the main systems (with their actors, activities and internal relations) and the main interactions between them involved in assessment reform processes in Chile?
• How are discourses on assessment produced, how do they circulate in this system, and how does knowledge on assessment relate to power issues?

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